Specializations: Postcolonial literature and theory, the culture and politics of Islam in modernity, early modern English literature—especially the literature of religious strife—and the history of twentieth-century criticism.

Research interests: ranging from film, Hellenism, historicism, European perceptions of Europe’s own history and identity, networks of cultural circulation in the Mediterranean, religion, theology and theory, the history of European Christianity, religious fundamentalisms, neoliberalism, the rise of the global right, contemporary British fiction, gender and religion, early Netherlandish and Renaissance painting, contemporary Pakistani art, to the transformation of Pakistani popular music in the past fifty years.

Books:

At Freedom’s Limit: Islam and the Postcolonial Predicament, published by Fordham University Press, 2014.

The Empty Room, a novel set in Karachi a couple of decades ago, forthcoming Dec. 2017, Zubaan Press, India.

Books in progress:

A book on Hellenism and Postcolonialism, tentatively titled Space in Another Time.

A second novel.

Publishedacademicessays on the Catholic martyrological poetics of Robert Southwell, the fiction of the Muslim diaspora, Jewish converts to Islam and migrants to Pakistan, the uses of Reformation in contemporary Muslim thought, and treatments of subjectivity in contemporary theorizations of Muslim female agency. Forthcoming essays on the ideas of Greece and of Europe in the work of Quratulain Hyder and Stratis Myrivilis, and art and society in Pakistan.

Current projects:

Lecture Series:

Conceived and coordinate the Beyond Islamophobia and Postcolonial Questions and Perfomances lecture series.

Courses Taught

Undergraduate courses I have taught at Rutgers include “Transnational Muslim Fiction,” “Religion and Literature,” “Literature and Decolonization,” and “Techniques of Poetry. I have taught graduate course such as “Introduction to Postcolonial Theory and Literature,” and “Religion, Literature and Theory” and “Spy Novels and Empire.”

Education

B.A. Wellesley College

Ph.D. Brown University

Publications

The Echo-Chamber of Freedom: The Muslim Woman and the Pretext of Agency.” Forthcoming, boundary 2.

“Religion in the Age of Identity: The Challenge of the Novel,” Contemporary Literature, November, 2011.